One Percent Everything Else

Main menu

Escrache ‘Em Where It Hurts

I love the smell of burning hypocrite in the morning… smells like sneaky apocalypse now. Yes, the karma repo guy is out serving notice to the mealy-mouthed and split-tongued alike, giving them a taste of real democrazy in its purest form. Anathema alert!

Just when the politicos in Spain thought things could not possibly get any worse for them, the PAH decided to take their struggle to the next level and go with the “escrache” approach. The PAH is the platform against foreclosures, a grassroots citizen group that has sprung up throughout Spain and, up to now, has been dedicated to physically impeding foreclosures with human chains and occupying bank offices to demand foreclosure renegotiations. They have been successful in many cases, but simply cannot keep up with the increasing rate of foreclosures, on average 80.000 a year or 321 a day for every work week. See here the stark portrait of the problem as explained by the New York Times.

PAH protestor arrested for blocking a foreclosure

The escrache approach is simple: instead of protesting in some random public venue, the gatherings are organized in front of the home of a selected target politico, and include plastering the walls with “wanted” signs with the target’s picture and warning the dwellers of their neighbor’s pariah status. This strategy, first used in Argentina in 1995, has now appeared in Spain with last week’s protests in front of the Valencia homes of PayPay politicos Gonzales Pons and Belén Juste. Needless to say, this comes as a nasty shock to the POWers To Be who thought the serfs would never dare single them out individually. In fine karmic irony, the escrache method could be considered the highest form of “democracy”, which technically means “mob rule” although it is generally applied as “mob under rule”. When Mr. Mob is no longer Under Rule is when we get our first taste of real, not formal, democrazy.

Escraching in Valencia at the doors of a politico’s home… nazis in action?

The Gonzales Pons was so shaken by the whole affair that he jumped right onto the N-word. When “Nazi” is used, the stench of politico fear hangs heavy in the air. “To scare my family is a mafia method (…) They say they’re going to single me out, just like the Nazis did with the Jews.” Hello hypocrisy! First of all, to send the cops at the behest of the banxters to evict unemployed families from their homes is mafia style, to protest against the criminals is democracy, you moron. Secondly, Spain has its own Nazis, except they’re called National Catchalicks. By jove, is there not a single one of you that wasn’t groomed in snake-handler school?

For the PTB, mob actions are a direct threat to THE rule regarding corporate impunity. The rule of law sez it’s “unfair” to “single out” individuals for the crimes of the corporate power structure both public and private. Because corporations are persons, you can only blame the corporation, not the corporate officer persons who actually gave and took the orders.

It is this deeply flawed line of thought that has gotten us in this mess. Screw civility, respect is for s/he who earns it. The bank directors that foreclose on families with no resources and the politicos that lick their spittle are more terrorists than any al-CIAda will ever be.

Corporations are just a legal fiction to cover for the criminal activities of criminal individuals. Blaming corporations for criminal activity is like blaming a house for being a crack den. We can understand it is not the house’s fault that the people inside choose to smoke crack, and we do not expect it to answer for them. Why then do we stand for the persons hiding in the corporate house to continue their individual criminal activities while we struggle against faceless, soulless, behemoth fictions? If they drive us into poverty and misery, it’s just business, no fault of the douchebags in charge. If we respond, we are labelled as terrorists. Get the picture? That’s why we are continually being pissed on and told it’s raining. The truth of the matter is that the corporation is just a body of illusion, the only reality is the flesh and blood inside.

Last time I looked, the POWers To Be are outnumbered about seven million to one. Let’s say that, at any given moment, ten percent of those seven million human beans stay home watching the game, another ten percent are buying fried chicken, a further ten percent is sexting and a full twenty percent are trying to park their cars. Add on the folks who are out fishing, who have gone missing, who are locked up, bugged out, stripped down and otherwise unavailable, and you got yourself maybe one percent up in arms, at best. So, seventy thousand of us against every one of them… still seems well within the doable category.

PAH protestor arrested for occupying a bank

We are each and every one of us human beans, and no corporation has the right to screw us no matter what their statutes say. If we can lawfully be intimidated and coerced as individual corporate assets, then so can the officials. It is that simple. If they want to be left alone, then they must back off first. If they insist on treating us like worthless bloodbags, then that’s how they will be treated in turn.

No matter how far apart they start, all combats end body to body. And the body civil, when gathered under a common banner, is a formidable contender against the body corporate. We got crazy technique, we got the occupy, the escrache, the harlem shake… um, did I mention there’s lots and lots of us, too?

Divide and conquer? No, no more. Now is time to come together and prevail.